YOU KNOW those short blog posts that feel like mere frilly window dressing for an embedded video — when the text is literally just pretext for a pre-packaged, outside-source quick clip? (Hello, Comedy Central.) When the words read like 60-second mind-spew simply to win your easy “news”-site click — as if you were as cheap and gullible as a ten-dollar john?
Well, this is one of those posts, and yet it is not. We at Comic Riffs are not posting the following video as low-lying, quick-and-dirty click-bait (honestly, share this through Hulu, for all we care). We are writing this copy-block as short setup because this video, as commentary, is worth seeing if you watch Hollywood popcorn fare at all.
Now, let me just say: I give credit to “Saturday Night Live” writers. Their network, NBC, is not even Disney/Marvel’s house brand — that would be ABC — but “SNL” has done fine satirical work with Marvel films when such actors as Chris Pratt (“Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy”; late of NBC’s “Parks and Rec”) and Chris Hemsworth (Marvel’s “Thor” and “Avengers” franchises) have hosted Lorne Michaels’s firstborn late-night baby.
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But in the wee hours of Saturday turning into Sunday, as Scarlett Johansson hosted to promote “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, “SNL” unfurled perhaps its best satirical Marvel bit yet.
Now, I’ve interviewed Johansson just once, about her Black Widow role, but she came across as sharp, funny and quick on the punch-line pivot — she knows how to lower her voice just so (and just sotto), to add up some serration to that comedic edge. And she seemed especially game over the weekend to put that low, dry delivery to prime use.
Now, I know I promised a pithy, “window dressing” setup to this video, but well, I can’t do 60-second mind-spew, because I’ve been appreciating this “SNL” digital short intermittently, on the brain’s back-burner, several times today. That’s because, well, in setting the scene, I’m reminded that context — not pretext — is everything. And it’s crucial to remember this:
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Black Widow, as the only female Avenger in the filmic franchise continuity, has to carry a lot of symbolism on those black-clad leathered shoulders. She also has to deflect the bias that keeps boomeranging like a Vibranium frisbee. So when Jeremy Renner (aka Hawkeye) and Chris Evans (Captain America) joke that Black Widow is an Avenger-flirting “slut” and a “whore,” sure they’re just joking amid the press-tour slog — but it still matters. And when Mark Ruffalo (aka big-screen Hulk 3.0) lobbies a toymaker to make more Black Widow merchandise — more on par with her fellow Avengers — it absolutely matters. And when Black Widow is the only team member who doesn’t rise to the challenge to try to hoist Thor’s phallic symbol in a party scene early in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” well, her self-respect and lack of power-issues matter, too.
Then, of course, there’s that little matter that Black Widow, unlike most of Joss Whedon’s main Avengers, still hasn’t had her own film. (No wonder she and Hawkeye are such mutually empathetic pals.)
And then there is Johansson’s own frequent persona on the big screen. When she’s done anything remotely resembling a romantic comedy, it’s typically been, say, in Spanish scenes of depth and complexity with Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem (which of course followed by five years the Japanese scenes of depth and complexity with Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation”). And her recent non-Marvel roles in such films as “Lucy,” “Her” and “Under the Skin” have radiated varying shades of female empowerment.
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So getting back to the digital video short at hand (and my, this “window dressing” now seems large enough to fit an entire glass skyroof on a top-floor ballroom; my apologies): The idea that both Johannson and Black Widow would stoop to a Katherine Heigl-like “rom-com,” as a perky, slightly insecure “girl” who takes Manhattan, “meets cute” with Ultron and wins over Kate McKinnon’s “Anna Wintour” thanks to her gosh-darn gumption and moxie and can-do spirit — well, “SNL” just satirically shredded those 27 dresses like Heidi Klum and Michael Kors verbally slicing and dicing A-lines made of kale.
Next up: “Roman-off Holiday,” anyone?
Brava and huzzahs, “SNL.” As Tim Gunn would say, you made it so:
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